If you are so keen on reading wikipedia articles you should go through some of the ships that entered service, like most in the black sea fleet, and compare them to the size of the wikipedia articles of ships that were never in service like the Graf Zeppelin. There is more difference here than nationality. Thinking Alaska "never saw battle" is your own words, not mine. That was never my opinion.

and there were ships that entered service that did none of these things. Doing literally nothing, yet being still being less important than half-built ships that have a political history. A lot of German war machines were planned and built and never used that have richer histories than some class of ship that never saw battle and was sold and scrapped within the first decade of being in service.

It is the Kronshtadt's HP pool that is too low. Kronshtadt should have 23% higher HP based on its displacement, but it's only 16% more. Of course this is the NA forums, so people will naturally complain that every USN ship is not better than every other across the board, and even then people would still point at the low winrates and complain about that, not realizing that their own quality of play is adding to the problem.

If you want to play a ship that always damage BBs no matter how they are angled, just play Yamato instead. Relies a lot less on good RNG and the enemy team playing like bozos, and it can wreck cruisers instead of being farmed by them. Having armour that can actually absorb shells instead of taking 15k every time a BB looks at you is a plus as well. KGV is the strongest ship in that line imo.
As for fires, it's very inconsistant. Sometimes a Yamato will tank you forever and shrug off the few fires you put on it and you get 1 fire every 15 shell hits. Other times....

this is a good change. IFHE no longer mandatory but still important to have since you'll be shooting at 30mm more often than not. Republique might suffer too much from this though, I think just the Republique should have its armour buffed to 33mm from 32mm to compensate for this change.

So it's just a big shell magnet now with the mediocre Kronshtadt guns at T10? Not sure if I want to throw out so much steel for a ship that's even more of a punching bag than the Moskva, at least my Harugumo will have some fat Moskvas to farm when both ships are released.

I just wish there was a video of it where the enemies didn't sail broadside to it for easy citadels all game...
something tells me that if that didn't happen, those guns would not seem very strong at all compared to the damage output of other cruisers.